Oregon
Here are some drone pictures of my drive through Oregon
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Columbia Basin – 360° Farm
I was visiting family in Washington and created the following 360° panoramas with my Drone.
The first shot was taken with an altitude of 500 meters above ground. It gives a brief overview of the area:
Apple Music is a cool streaming service, which I have been enjoying for a while now. Even though the service is well done, the integration into the Music App on the iPhone could be improved. With WWDC 2017 and iOS 11 coming up, lets look at what could change.
Some of my major issues and ideas on how they could be improved are:
- In case of a poor network connection I would like to play songs that are on my phone. Therefore: Show which songs are on the phone vs in the cloud. I don’t really need to know if I “own” the song vs or if it’s a cached “streamed” song.
- The custom stations are great, but sometimes I would like to add the one song. Therefore: Allow songs to be added to Up Next while listening to a station. Stopping the station, playing the song and then restarting the station provides a bad user experience and is also confusing. Since I can skip songs in the station it would be great to also allow insertion of songs.
- Nowadays a good search is the goto than browsing through thousands of songs. Therefore: Instead of having the search in a separate tab, just put it everywhere as a global search. Such as putting it next to the title or as pull-down.
- Some songs are not available for streaming but can be purchased. Therefore: When searching, also include songs that are only available for purchase. It would be very useful to know about available purchasable songs and would prevent users of having to switch to the iTunes Store and search again manually.
- Make Up Next (or another feature) more prominent.
What do you think about my ideas and suggestions? What would you like to see improved in the next version of Apple Music?
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DailyUI #003 – Landing Page
Well, I definitely slacked a little bit with the UI-challenge, but I finally got back to it!
Challenge #3 asked to create a landing page. I chose to try to work on Delta‘s homepage (no pun intended). I did not change their interface terribly, but here are two things I would like to highlight:
- Instead of many links I propose the usage of a more universal search-field. Enter a flight-code, a question or even a ticket number and it should try to find relevant information for you. Sure, you can use Google for that, but why shouldn’t a big company’s website be able to offer a smart site-wide search?
- It’s an airline, so why not show a plane ✈️ on the landing page 😉
- Only ask for information you cannot derive – I know this idea has some drawbacks, but what if a user is only asked the destination they would like to fly to? Maybe a previous page visit gave us the departure airport or it can be derived from the users current location. – Of course we should allow the customer to change this information in the process.
Please let me know what you think and where I can make improvements!
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ID3 Decision trees ?
As part of the Machine Learning class in (CIS 678) at GVSU, Camila and I created a decision tree tool that analyzes and processes a data-set, where each entry has a different combination of attributes and an expected outcome. The system then finds the «best» attributes, that allow deciding which outcome will occur with the least amount of questions, for previously seen or new data.
The website & tool takes data-sets in the form of a simple text-file, then parses & processes it and finally creates a decision tree ? based on that data. Please check it out and let us know what you think and how you like it.
The tool can be accessed on this sub-site.
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DailyUI #002 – Credit Card Checkout
Today’s assignment was to create a credit card checkout.
To give myself a better context, I decided to checkout a monitor and took an existing online-shop to help guide some of my decisions (you can guess which one it is 😉 ). Please let me know what you like and what you think needs improvement.
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DailyUI #001 – Sign Up Screen
Hello everyone,
Today I completed my first DailyUI-Challenge #001. The task was to create a Sign Up screen.
My idea was to make it as simple as possible. Consequently I combined Sign Up and Log In. First it would start by letting the user add their email address. Then, if they already have an account it would then prompt them to enter their password. Since the user sam.fisher@mymail.com does not have an account yet, a confirmation-mail will be sent to him, to verify that the provided address actually is controlled by him.
Being able to show, whether a user needs to Sign Up or Log In, implies that the website discloses, if an email account already exists. While this brings certain drawbacks it might be okay, depending on your website.
Please let me know how you like it!
Sources:
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How about fixing Blackboard?
One of the more popular online learning (and training) management systems for high schools and universities in the United States is Blackboard. However, despite the fact that it has a lot to offer, many of it’s features are hidden deep in the interface.
We all came across it [ or at least most of us 😉 ]. You come to a new school or university and for sure, every single one of them uses a different learning platform like Moodle, OpenOLAT or Blackboard. These applications offer different ways for managing classes/courses, knowledge, vary greatly in features. They do have a few infamously commonalities, such as lacking simplicity, focus and consistency. However, in this particular post I would like to take a look at Grand Valley State Universities’s Blackboard (myBB) solution. As part of the CIS 623 class I am taking I received an assignment to design an improved version of it.
Why are online learning
platforms so frustrating?
In order to work on a new design I tried to locate a few of the major problem areas. There are several platform-external and -internal reasons why they might fail from my very personal opinion, such as:
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First design steps… – Retirement Calculator
In order to broaden my skills I decided to take a graphical user interface class at GVSU this fall. Our first assignment was to create a retirement calculator. It was required to deliver a solution that is both simple enough for someone who is completely new to these type of calculations, but offers a lot of functionality to «pro»-users.
We were asked to follow as closely as possible the way ballpark suggests these kind of computation and we were asked to implement our design. While I have a rough prototype – I would like to show you my current design and would be happy to hear your feedback.
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OS X Leopard – Performance Test
Yesterday I decided to run a small “performance test”, said test wasn’t scientific by any means but, I had my iMac open all 73 applications that were installed at the time.
Do not repeat this at home
Me, September 2009
My iMac is running OS X Leopard (10.5.8) and not the soon to be released Snow Leopard.
Procedure:
- Start screen recording
- Open applications folder
- Select all applications (cmd + a)
- Open all applications (cmd + o)
- wait… – a lot of it
The consequence was a dramatic wait of 40 minutes while my iMac was desperately trying to open all applications. From time to time I had to click away some warnings and messages, but in the end 73 applications were opened.
The interesting observation are:
- while the operating system was indeed very slow, it actually did not result in a crash.
- while the computer was busy opening all the applications it wasn’t possible to interact with any of the applications besides Exposé and Activity Monitor, of which the latter was rather responsive – especially when compared to the remaining 72 applications
- the screen recording was captured successfully without any missing frames
The 20x accelerated video is still on YouTube to this date (though it has been flagged due to the music it contains). There have been still scenes, where nothing happened, which have been cut out of the video.
Translated in November 2020 – Article originally from 2009